This dissertation proposes a comprehensive solution to the problem of building device-independent (or multi-channel) user interfaces promoting the separation of the interface from the application logic. It introduces an interface model (Meta-Interface Model, or MIM) for separating the user interface from the application logic and the presentation device. MIM divides the interface into three components, presentation, interface, and logic, that are connected with abstract vocabularies designed in terms of user chosen abstraction. The logic component provides a canonical way for the user interface to communicate with an application. The presentation component provides a canonical way for the user interface to render itself independently of the platform. The interface component describes the interaction between the user and the application using a set of abstract parts, events, and method calls that are device and application independent. MIM goes one step further than earlier models and subdivides the interface into four additional subcomponents: structure, style, content, and behavior. The structure describes the organization of the parts in the interface, the style describes the presentation specific properties of each part, the content describes the information that is presented to the user, and the behavior describes user interaction with the interface in a platform-independent manner. This dissertation also presents the second version of the User Interface Markup Language (UIML2), a declarative language that derives its syntax from XML and realizes the MIM model. It also gives the design rationale behind the language and discusses the implementation issues for mapping UIML2 to various devices (Java/JFC, PalmOS, WML, HTML, and VoiceXML). Finally, this dissertation evaluates UIML2 in terms of its goals, and among the major ones are to provide a canonical format for describing interfaces that map to multiple devices and to generate one description of a user interface connection to the application logic independent of target device. / Ph. D.

This paper investigates into the transmission cost of web services related messages which is affected by network latency. Web services enable seamless interaction and integration of e-business applications. Web services contain a collection of operations so as to interact with outside world over the Internet through XML messaging. Though XML effectively describe message related information and is fairly human readable, it badly affects the performance of Web services in terms of transmission cost, processing cost, and so on. This paper aims to minimize network latency of message communication of Web services by employing pre-emptive resume scheduling. Fundamental principle of this approach is the provision of preferential treatment to some messages as compared to others. This approach assigns different priorities to distinct classes of messages given the fact that some messages may tolerate longer delays than others. For instance, shorter messages may be given higher priority than longer messages, or the Web service provider may give higher priority to the messages of paying subscribers.

The XDRIVE engine is a runtime solution for the coordination and display of web-based multimedia presentations that feature three-dimensional content. This 3D content is rendered in real-time, which facilitates user-defined navigation and interaction with objects contained within the 3D virtual environment. These presentations can run independently, or they can be synchronized with audio and video files. As web browsers interpret HTML formatted files, XDRIVE presentations are authored in and interpreted from XML formatted files, which are loaded and interpreted by the engine to display the defined content. Just as web browsers can load and display external files as guided and linked by the HTML tags, XDRIVE presentations rely on links to external files that are imported and displayed as guided by the XML tags. Developed using Macromedia Director MX - a multimedia development software package - the XDRIVE engine itself is a Shockwave file that is embedded in a web page. Shockwave, a format whose browser plug-in is free to install and is loaded on a variety of systems, allows for the coordination of multiple media and data types, and features a powerful set of tools for the use of 3D content through the Shockwave3D format. XDRIVE is designed to open the functionality of web-based 3D to a wider audience - allowing for custom presentations to be authored without a prerequisite knowledge of complicated programming languages, and 3D scripting. The XDRIVE engine is a series of scripted systems that utilize and connect various components of Director, and provide additional capabilities above those that already exist. / Master of Science

No description available.

Natural language understanding has been a persistent challenge to researchers in various computer science fields, in a number of applications ranging from user support systems to entertainment and online teaching. A long term goal of the Artificial Intelligence field is to implement mechanisms that enable computers to emulate human dialogue. The recently developed ALICEbots, virtual agents with underlying AIML scripts, by A.L.I.C.E. foundation, use AIML scripts - a subset of XML - as the underlying pattern database for question answering. Their goal is to enable pattern-based, stimulus-response knowledge content to be served, received and processed over the Web, or offline, in the manner similar to HTML and XML. In this thesis, we describe a system that converts the AIML scripts to Prolog clauses and reuses them as part of a knowledge processor. The inference mechanism developed in this thesis is able to successfully match the input pattern with our clauses database even if words are missing. We also emulate the pattern deduction algorithm of the original logic deduction mechanism. Our rules, compatible with Semantic Web standards, bring structure to the meaningful content of Web pages and support interactive content retrieval using natural language.

The Digital Marmor Parium is a project of the Alexander von Humboldt Chair of Digital Humanities at the University of Leipzig (http://www.dh.uni-leipzig.de/wo/dmp). The aim of this work is to produce a new digital edition of the so called Marmor Parium (Parian Marble), which is a Hellenistic chronicle on a marble slab coming from the Greek island of Paros. The importance of the document is due to the fact that it preserves a Greek chronology (1581/80-299/98 BC) with a list of kings and archons accompanied by short references to historical events mainly based on the Athenian history.

Durant cette dernière décennie, la diffusion du format XML pour représenter les données générées par et échangées sur le Web a été accompagnée par la mise en œuvre de nombreux moteurs d’évaluation de requêtes et de mises à jour XQuery. Parmi ces moteurs, les systèmes « mémoire centrale » (Main-memory Systems) jouent un rôle très important dans de nombreuses applications. La gestion et l’intégration de ces systèmes dans des environnements de programmation sont très faciles. Cependant, ces systèmes ont des problèmes de passage à l’échelle puisqu’ils requièrent le chargement complet des documents en mémoire centrale avant traitement.Cette thèse présente une technique de partitionnement des documents XML qui permet aux moteurs « mémoire principale » d’évaluer des expressions XQuery (requêtes et mises à jour) pour des documents de très grandes tailles. Cette méthode de partitionnement s’applique à une classe de requêtes et mises à jour pertinentes et fréquentes, dites requêtes et mises à jour itératives.Cette thèse propose une technique d'analyse statique pour reconnaître les expressions « itératives ». Cette analyse statique est basée sur l’extraction de chemins à partir de l'expression XQuery, sans utilisation d'information supplémentaire sur le schéma. Des algorithmes sont spécifiés, utilisant les chemins extraits par l’étape précédente, pour partitionner les documents en entrée en plusieurs parties, de sorte que la requête ou la mise à jour peut être évaluée sur chaque partie séparément afin de calculer le résultat final par simple concaténation des résultats obtenus pour chaque partie. Ces algorithmes sont mis en œuvre en « streaming » et leur efficacité est validée expérimentalement.En plus, cette méthode de partitionnement est caractérisée également par le fait qu'elle peut être facilement implémentée en utilisant le paradigme MapReduce, permettant ainsi d'évaluer une requête ou une mise à jour en parallèle sur les données partitionnées. / With the widespread diffusion of XML as a format for representing data generated and exchanged over the Web, main query and update engines have been designed and implemented in the last decade. A kind of engines that are playing a crucial role in many applications are « main-memory » systems, which distinguish for the fact that they are easy to manage and to integrate in a programming environment. On the other hand, main-memory systems have scalability issues, as they load the entire document in main-memory before processing. This Thesis presents an XML partitioning technique that allows main-memory engines to process a class of XQuery expressions (queries and updates), that we dub « iterative », on arbitrarily large input documents. We provide a static analysis technique to recognize these expressions. The static analysis is based on paths extracted from the expression and does not need additional schema information. We provide algorithms using path information for partitioning the input documents, so that the query or update can be separately evaluated on each part in order to compute the final result. These algorithms admit a streaming implementation, whose effectiveness is experimentally validated. Besides enabling scalability, our approach is also characterized by the fact that it is easily implementable into a MapReduce framework, thus enabling parallel query/update evaluation on the partitioned data.

Die Auszeichnungssprache XML definiert eine einfache Syntax für strukturierte Daten, die sich so applikationsübergreifend einsetzen lassen. Eine der wichtigsten Voraussetzungen für den Austausch solcher XML-Daten ist die Möglichkeit ihrerTransformation. Unter den derzeit verfügbaren Transformationsmethoden für XML hat die Sprache XSLT als W3C-Standard die größte Verbreitung gefunden. Allerdings skaliert XSLT nicht für große Datenmengen, da hier eine Gesamtsicht auf das XML-Dokument vorausgesetzt wird. Andere existierende Transformationsmethoden besitzen entweder die gleiche Eigenschaft oder erfordern die Programmierung auf der XML-fernen Ebene einer Programmiersprache. In dieser Arbeit wird mit STX eine Transformationssprache für XML entwickelt, die diese Lücke füllt. STX orientiert sich sehr stark an XSLT, verarbeitet jedoch ein XML-Dokument als Datenstrom. STX kann so prinzipiell beliebig große Dokumente transformieren. Die aus der Sprache XPath 2.0 des W3C abgeleitete STX-Pfadsprache (STXPath) trägt dabei der eingeschränkten Sicht auf die zu transformierenden Daten Rechnung, indem sie nur den Zugriff auf die Vorfahren des jeweiligen Kontextknotens ermöglicht. Zu den neuartigen Konzepten in STX zählen neben prozeduralen Eigenschaften vor allem Gruppen, Schnittstellen zu externen Transformationsprozessen, die komplexe Transformation von Zeichenketten sowie Sprachmittel zur Fehlerbehandlung. Diese Arbeit stellt Entwurfsmuster für die wichtigsten Transformationstypen in STX vor und demonstriert an drei Fallbeispielen den Einsatz in realen Projekten. Der dazu verwendete STX-Prozessor Joost verfügt zudem über standardisierteJava-Schnittstellen, die dessen Integration in bestehende Java-Applikationen erleichtern. / The markup language XML defines a simple syntax for structured data that can be used across application boundaries. One of the most important prerequisites for the interchange of such XML data is the possibility of its transformation. Among the currently available transformation approaches for XML, the W3C standard XSLT has gained the biggest popularity. However, XSLT doesn''t scale for huge amounts of data because it requires an overall view to an XML document. Other existing transformation approaches either have the same character or require low-level programming using a general programming language. This PhD thesis introduces STX, an XML transformation language that fills this gap. STX is strongly geared to XSLT, though it processes an XML document as a stream. Therefore, STX is able to transform documents of any size. The STX path language (STXPath), derived from the W3C standard XPath 2.0, considers the restricted view to the input data and enables the access only to the ancestors of the current context node. The new concepts in STX include besides its procedural behaviour mainly groups, interfaces to external transformation processes, complex transformations of strings, as well as language means for error handling. This work introduces design patterns for the most important transformation types in STX and demonstrates three real-life scenarios. The STX processor Joost used for this purpose provides in addition standardized Java interfaces that facilitate its integration into existing Java applications.

Sistemas de operação remota e supervisão de iluminação pública são compostos por dispositivos acoplados aos pontos de luz interligados via rede, e aplicativos que são executados em computadores que indicam problemas nos pontos de iluminação e apuram o valor do consumo de energia. Estudar as tecnologias dos trabalhos correlatos, propor um sistema dedicado para iluminação pública e implantar o sistema proposto em um teste piloto para avaliação das características de operação e supervisão são os objetivos do trabalho. A arquitetura do sistema proposto é modular e expansível. O modelo baseado em células permite que novos conjuntos de dispositivos possam ser adicionados de acordo com a demanda. No desenvolvimento do trabalho a linguagem C# é adotada para desenvolver a operação e supervisão através do padrão CyberOPC (Cybernetic OPC) e arquivos do tipo XML são aplicados para descrição dos dispositivos e definição da topologia da rede. Os resultados obtidos em simulação e no teste piloto validam a metodologia e arquitetura proposta. / Systems of remote operation and supervision of public lighting are composed of devices attached to the light points interconnected via a network, and applications that run on computers that indicate problems with lighting points and discharge the amount of energy consumption. Studying the related works technologies, propose a system dedicated to public lighting and deploy the proposed system in a pilot test to evaluate the operating characteristics and supervision are the objectives of the work. The architecture of the proposed system is modular and expandable. The cell-based model allows new sets of devices can be added according to demand. In developing the work the C # language is adopted to develop the operation and monitoring via standard CyberOPC (Cybernetic OPC) and XML file types are applied to the device description and definition of the network topology. The results obtained from simulation and from the test pilot validate the methodology and the proposed architecture.

With the advent of XML, great challenges arise from the demand for efficiently retrieving information from remote XML sources across the Internet. The semantic caching technology can help to improve the efficiency of XML query processing in the Web environment. Different from the traditional tuple or page-based caching systems, semantic caching systems exploit the idea of reusing cached query results to answer new queries based on the query containment and rewriting techniques. Fundamental results on the containment of relational queries have been established. In the XML setting, the containment problem remains unexplored for comprehensive XML query languages such as XQuery, and little has been studied with respect to the cache management issue such as replacement. Hence, this dissertation addresses two issues fundamental to building an XQuery-based semantic caching system: XQuery containment and rewriting, and an effective replacement strategy. We first define a restricted XQuery fragment for which the containment problem is tackled. For two given queries $Q1$ and $Q2$, a preprocessing step including variable minimization and query normalization is taken to transform them into a normal form. Then two tree structures are constructed for respectively representing the pattern matching and result construction components of the query semantics. Based on the tree structures, query containment is reduced to tree homomorphism, with some specific mapping conditions. Important notations and theorems are also presented to support our XQuery containment and rewriting approaches. For the cache replacement, we propose a fine-grained replacement strategy based on the detailed user access statistics recorded on the internal XML view structure. As a result, less frequently used XML view fragments are replaced to achieve a better utilization of the cache space. Finally, we has implemented a semantic caching system called ACE-XQ to realize the proposed techniques. Case studies are conducted to confirm the correctness of our XQuery containment and rewriting approaches by comparing the query results produced by utilizing ACE-XQ against those by the remote XQuery engine. Experimental studies show that the query performance is significantly improved by adopting ACE-XQ, and that our partial replacement helps to enhance the cache hits and utilization comparing to the traditional total replacement.